Cisco Security System Shuts Out Third-Party Tools

alphadogg writes "Cisco has finally publicly acknowledged it won't add support for new third-party devices to its security information and event monitoring appliance, ending months of speculation about the future of its Monitoring, Analysis and Response System. Some claim it's the beginning of the end for MARS as a multi-vendor SIEM device. 'MARS customers can expect non-Cisco network device data and signature updates to continue for currently supported third-party systems, but no new third-party devices will be added,' Cisco declared in a statement, noting that 'Cisco MARS continues to focus on supporting Cisco devices for threat identification and mitigation.' Cisco's SIEM competitors this week have eagerly grabbed at the topic of Cisco MARS freezing third-party support because of a Gartner research memo published Oct. 29 in which analyst Mark Nicolett stated, 'Cisco has quietly begun informing its customers of a decision to freeze support for most non-Cisco event sources with its [MARS].'"

Comments

DMCA Borks Homeland Security, Film at 11

[girlintraining]

Since SIEM equipment is typically used to consolidate alert and event data from multiple vendor sources...

Isn't that quaint! All these demands by the government to secure and protect critical "cyber"-resources, and here we have a major vendor basically giving the middle finger to that initative, making it more expensive and difficult to accomplish that objective. Once again two government initatives are at odds with each other: You have the DMCA and copyright advocates on one side, who have made overriding vendor lock-in by creating interoperability illegal, and national security interests on the other side asking ISPs and internet-connected networks to be secure.

Cisco won't allow legitimate owners to patch

[overThruster]

Cisco doesn't allow legitimate owners of their hardware to apply security patches without an exorbitantly expensive software subscription. I found this out when I purchased some of their hardware on ebay for self-study purposes. Personally, I think that's a bigger issue. It means that many individuals and small businesses out there are probably running outdated, insecure versions of their software. Not good!

Security patches should be freely available for the good of the whole Internet community.

Re:Cisco won't allow legitimate owners to patch

[amorsen]

Cisco doesn't allow legitimate owners of their hardware to apply security patches without an exorbitantly expensive software subscription.

This is actually not true. Security patches are available without a subscription. Read the security advisories published by Cisco.

Taking advantage of the offer is sufficiently inconvenient so I don't think very many do.

MARS is a joke

[vvaduva]

I've been a MARS admin/user for a few years and this is not a surprise at all. I have first generation hardware - right after the purchase, Cisco announced that they no longer provide software updates for 1st gen machines, trying to push new hardware down customers throats, so for about a year I was unable to patch or update my environment. Finally they gave in last year and started supporting both 1st and 2nd generation hardware again (I assume because customers were running away from their sinking MARS ship).

This announcement is not a surprise at all since they've been pushing netflow like crazy, however a true event management solution should not be vendor centric to begin with. It's a pain to get MARS to take in events from Windows machines for example, or accept and manage events from other sources, so the announcement that that will no longer continue the non-existent support they had before is a non-sequitur.

Apparently the mentality at Cisco now is that if they paint a box green and write Cisco on it, people will buy it.